Speaker Index

With more than eighteen years of experience in software testing, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions in companies including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. In his current role as director of Live Site Quality for eBay, Jon is dedicated to building “end-to-end” tests (activity flows) in eBay’s core sites to discover important bugs that threaten its core business. He is most notable for creating, with his brother James, Session-Based Test Management, a method to manage and report exploratory testing.

Aaron Barrett is the director of quality assurance at Infusionsoft in Chandler, Arizona. But Aaron’s first testing job was seventeen years ago at a small educational software company. Since that time he has held testing and management roles in a variety of organizations in the government, education, and business software verticals. A certified ScrumMaster, Aaron currently oversees a test group that operates in an agile Scrum software development environment.

Richard Bender has over forty-five years experience in software with a primary focus on quality assurance and testing. He has consulted internationally to large and small corporations, government agencies, and the military. Richard’s work has included a wide variety of application classes and technology bases from embedded systems to super computer-based systems—and everything in between—consulting to both vendors and IT departments alike. He has been active in establishing industry standards for software quality and is a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and corporate events.

A leader in quality engineering at Intuit, Vikas Bhupalam encourages the adoption of new processes and tools in test automation. Vikas’ innovative approach to solving complex problems across various business units has helped products scale to optimal levels of quality, performance, and security. His expertise across both functional and performance test automation, including a development background, has helped him build various frameworks using a variety of tools and technologies. A passionate engineer, Vikas attends to details that help test SaaS-based applications.

A certified software testing engineer (CSTE) for seven years, Susan Bradley has worked in quality assurance and testing for sixteen years. Today Susan strives to bring best manual testing processes to Grange Mutual Insurance where she is the enterprise QA software process architect. She had the opportunity to work on the top project initiative at Grange and interact closely with the business units to ensure a quality product. Susan is a member of the Central Ohio Quality Assurance Association.

An internationally recognized expert in testing, Hans Buwalda is a pioneer of keyword-driven test automation, an approach now widely adopted throughout the testing industry. Originally from the Netherlands, Hans is the CTO of LogiGear, directing the development of the successful Action Based Testing™ methodology for keyword-driven test automation and its supporting TestArchitect™ toolset. Prior to joining LogiGear, Hans served as project director at CMG (now CFI).

Product manager for HP’s Enterprise Security group, Erik Costlow is responsible for product strategy, working closely with customers as well as development, sales, and marketing teams. He has contributed to industry best practices including OpenSAMM. Previously, Erik worked as a software security consultant for Fortify Software (acquired by HP).

With thirty-six years of software industry experience, Bill Curtis is senior vice president and chief scientist at CAST, where he heads CAST Research Labs. Bill is the director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality, co-sponsored by SEI and OMG. He led development of the Capability Maturity Model and People CMM in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Bill co-founded TeraQuest, a provider of CMM-based services, which was sold to Borland in 2005.

Seretta Gamba has more than thirty years of experience in software development and testing. As test manager at Steria Mummert ISS GmbH, Seretta was charged with improving their test automation process in 2001. After studying other strategies, she developed Command-Driven Testing and a supporting framework. Seretta presented a 2009 enhancement to the framework that enabled the test automation team to “harvest” test case information by supporting manual testing.

With more than twenty years of leadership experience in all aspects of IT, Bob Goetz has focused on leading QA organizations for the last several years. As part of this, Bob has led the testing of several mega programs—more than $500 million. The first mega program turned Bob’s hair grey as he gained the experience to survive and thrive. That multi-year effort implemented new core business software while transforming business processes and introducing new products to the market.

In testing for more than thirty years, Dorothy Graham is coauthor of four books—Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing, and Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation. Dot was a founding member of the ISEB Software Testing Board, a member of the working party that developed the first ISTQB Foundation Syllabus, and served on the boards of conferences and publications in software testing.

Senior product director at SmartBear Software Mark Hammer speaks and writes about the software development process with a special emphasis on code review. Mark has more than twenty years of experience in software product management, previously at global-education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He has a strong track record in developing customer-focused business solutions in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. Mark was VP of marketing for CompassLearning, an educational software developer.

Matthew Heusser specializes in software delivery consulting—moving projects to done-done faster. But Matt may be best known for his writing, including serving as lead editor for How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing. A member of the board of directors of the Association for Software Testing, Matt was the lead organizer of Test Coach Camp, the Workshop on Technical Debt.

Geoff Horne has an extensive background in test program/project directorship and management, architecture, and general consulting. In New Zealand Geoff established and ran ISQA as a testing consultancy which enjoys a local and international clientele in Australia, the US, and the United Kingdom. He has held senior test management roles across a number of diverse industry sectors, and is editor and publisher of the recently launched NZTester magazine. Geoff has authored a variety of white papers on software testing and is a regular speaker at the STAR conferences.

With more than a decade of marketing experience at companies ranging from early-stage start-ups to publicly traded enterprises, Matt Johnston leads uTest's marketing and community management efforts. Since joining uTest as employee #8 in late 2008, Matt has provided a technical sensibility to uTest’s engagement of testers and engineers. As CMO, he leads uTest’s strategic initiatives, such as partnership formation and helping to define uTest’s expansion strategy.

After more than sixteen years in software testing and implementation, Kiran Karnad found his true calling in penetration testing. Proudly calling himself a hands-on lead for information security, Kiran has worked with several Fortune 500 companies and mentored software test teams in multiple geographies. Currently leading the functional and security efforts at MIMOS, Kiran strives to identify process improvement opportunities throughout the organization and to implement them effectively.

Industry veteran Colleen Kirtland is passionate about QA and the role of technology in helping to effect positive social change. As technology transforms the way we do things, there is a need to include not only solution quality but also human factors and organizational behavior as aspects of measuring quality. As an evangelist of proven quality practices, Colleen has served both as a leader and individual contributor in multiple companies and industries. She currently works as enterprise QA practice lead at The Capital Group Companies.

Ivan Kreslin is a principal software development engineer at Mitchell International, North America's leading provider of property and casualty claims technology solutions for most major insurance providers and collision repair shops. Ivan leads the test automation development efforts in the auto casualty solutions division, creating tools and architecting and integrating the tools into automation frameworks and libraries shared among the different feature teams. Ivan brings more than twenty-one years of software industry experience, most focused on quality and automation.

Ole Lensmar is chief architect at SmartBear Software, provider of software quality tools used by more than one-million developers and testers worldwide. Ole is the co-founder of eviware software which joined forces with SmartBear in 2011, and the creator of SoapUI, the most used API testing tool in the world. Living his passion for software development, Ole writes a weekly column for Network World about software quality; frequents the speaker circuit; and blogs in general about coding, quality, and all other fun things in life.

John McConda is an experienced Software Quality Control/Assurance tester, technician, and manager. Experienced in multiple methods of software testing from rigorous validated system testing, to session-based exploratory testing, test automation, and performance. Teacher and speaker for software testing classes and conferences.

Senior consultant and managing director of the test center at KROLL Consulting AG, Wiesbaden, Germany, Stephan Obbeck has more than fifteen years of IT experience with hands-on software testing and is a certified project and test manager. After starting his career as a tester, Stephan now invents test organizations for leading telecommunication and media companies in Europe and manages test projects. As an architect for test automation, Stephan supports organizations in moving from manual testing to automation.

Alan Page is a principal SDET—a fancy name for tester—on the Xbox console team at Microsoft. Edging up on twenty years in software testing, Alan has previously worked on a variety of Microsoft products including Windows, Windows CE, Internet Explorer, and Office Lync. He spent some time as Microsoft’s director of test excellence where he developed and ran technical training programs for testers throughout the company.

Dale Perry has more than thirty-six years of experience in information technology as a programmer/analyst, database administrator, project manager, development manager, tester, and test manager. Dale’s project experience includes large-system development and conversions, distributed systems, and both web-based and client/server applications. A professional instructor for more than twenty years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing.

Jason Rauen is a senior quality test analyst at Georgia-based LexisNexis Risk Solutions. With more than fifteen years of experience, Jason has led the data testing team in big data from its inception. He has presented big data scripting techniques at HPCC Systems national Data Summit. His background includes working at companies including Microsoft, AT&T, and LexisNexis, and instructing at Intel, Boeing, Executrain, and the Department of the Navy.

Adam Richards is the director of consulting services at Critical Logic, a consulting firm specializing in model-based testing tools and services. With nearly two decades in the industry, Adam has experience as a developer, business analyst, requirements manager, test analyst, and QA manager. He brings first-hand experience implementing model-based testing approaches on systems in a wide array of industries, across the entire gamut of development methodologies.

David Rosskopf has been addicted to test automation since 2006. As a bored technical support representative for the illegal-drug testing industry, David started introducing automation to simplify his job—and save time. He moved on to create large automation suites using various tools, creating solutions that simplified not only his job but the jobs of others. David currently works for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he helps control quality on an enterprise level facilities management and property application.

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization.

As founder and CEO of QA InfoTech Worldwide, Mukesh Sharma is responsible for the company's vision and leads the organization's worldwide operations, marketing, sales, and development efforts. Founding QA InfoTech with a vision to provide unbiased testing solutions, Mukesh has grown the organization to five Centers of Excellence with more than 650 employees. He began his technology career with DCM Data Systems, and then worked at IBM Corporation, Quark Inc., Gale Group, and Adobe Systems in software engineering and testing disciplines.

Clint Sprauve is a senior solutions architect for HP Software. Previously, Clint was the director of product strategy for the Borland Solutions Division of Micro Focus, where he created Borland’s mobile strategy for functional test automation. He has more than twenty years of experience in the software development and quality assurance industry. Clint has served as the senior product marketing manager for the Silk Testing Solutions at Borland Software and Segue Software, and served as a senior technical sales engineer for both companies.

Elizabeth Taylor, who started breaking software products in 1993, was described by one of her managers at Equifax as one who “delights in finding bugs.” Elizabeth has worked for both large companies (Intel and Equifax) and smaller startups (Motiva Software). Currently a staff QA engineer at Digimarc, Elizabeth has been the lead tester on Digimarc Discover since 2009. In 2012, she began automating Digimarc Discover testing, developing an automated test strategy that has saved time and improved product quality.

Vice president of mobile for ProtoTest Melissa Tondi is building a testing practice in the innovative world of mobile where the concentration is on functional, performance, and security, and the new mobile testing techniques. In the software test and quality engineering field for more than fifteen years, Melissa focuses on organizing testing teams around three major tenets—efficiency, innovation, and culture.

After eleven years as an astroparticle physicist, Christin Wiedemann brings her logical and analytical problem-solving skills to the world of testing. Five years into her new career, Christin is still eager to learn, looking for new ways to test more efficiently, constantly trying new approaches, and keen to share her experiences. In her roles as tester, test lead, trainer, and speaker, she uses her scientific background and pedagogic abilities to continually develop her own skills and those of others.